1 June, 2026.
Here is the question that Babachir Lawal, the former Secretary to the Government of the Federation, has conveniently refused to answer because the answer would destroy his entire argument in one devastating blow. Did the North vote for Atiku Abubakar because of ethnicity and religion, or was the election rigged? These two claims cannot coexist. They are not siblings. They are not cousins. They are mortal enemies that cannot occupy the same sentence without one strangling the other. Babachir wants Nigerians to believe both. He wants us to accept that Atiku and his syndicate wrote and rewrote results, replaced winners with their own cronies, and turned the ADC primaries into a disgraceful charade of rigging. And then, without pausing for breath, he wants us to also accept that the North voted for Atiku because they prefer a religious hegemonist over a competent economist. The logical mind recoils. The honest observer is forced to ask Babachir a simple question: which one is it? If the election was rigged, then the North did not vote for Atiku at all. Their preference was overridden. Their ballots, if any were cast, were discarded. They are victims of the very syndicate Babachir claims to despise. But if the North freely and willingly voted for Atiku based on religious affinity, then there was no rigging. Atiku won because the people chose him. Babachir cannot have it both ways. That he attempts to do so reveals either a profound intellectual dishonesty or a man so blinded by hatred that he no longer recognizes contradiction when it stares him in the face.
Babachir is not new to controversy. Nigerians remember him. They remember the grass-cutting scandal that earned him his unshakeable nickname. They remember how he was fired by President Muhammadu Buhari after the Senate indicted him for awarding a contract worth over N272 million to remove invasive plant species from Internally Displaced Persons camps in the North East. The contract went to Rholavision Engineering Limited, a company in which Babachir Lawal was a secret director. He approved public funds for his own pocket while starving IDPs watched. He was subsequently arrested by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and arraigned in court on ten counts of fraud and criminal conspiracy. That is the man who now writes about evil. That is the man who now lectures Nigeria on rigging, corruption, and moral conscience. A grasscutter lecturing farmers on the proper way to harvest yams is a spectacle, but a grasscutter who stole from the hungry lecturing the nation on integrity is a tragedy.
The contradictions in Babachir’s op-ed multiply like weeds in a neglected field. He declares that he left the ADC to avoid being part of Atiku’s rigging machine in the 2027 general elections. He claims that working for Atiku means giving President Tinubu an automatic second term, a prospect that gives him nightmares. And yet he immediately admits that Tinubu is currently as bad as he could ever be, but that Tinubu might comparatively end up a better Nigerian president than Atiku. He then predicts that Atiku will be mercilessly out-rigged and beaten to pulp by Tinubu’s ruthless and superior rigging machine. So Babachir’s objection is not to rigging itself. His objection is to being on the losing side of rigging. He prefers Tinubu’s riggers to Atiku’s riggers. That is not morality. That is the tantrum of a man who backed the wrong horse and is now trying to frame his exit as a righteous crusade. He cannot stand Atiku. He cannot fully embrace Tinubu. He offers no alternative. He simply runs to his village farm and promises to watch from there. That is not leadership. That is surrender dressed in the costume of protest.
But the most damning exposure of Babachir’s hypocrisy lies in the ethnic and religious venom that drips from every paragraph of his essay. He spends an entire composition spewing ethnocentric and religious jingoism of the most vulgar kind. He calls Atiku an irredentist Fulani and a religious hegemonist. He accuses Atiku’s camp of being a coven and a syndicate defined by their Fulani identity and religious ambition. He laments that Northerners prefer a religious hegemonist over a competent world-renowned economist. He declares that the North is perpetually doomed to self-harm because they choose leaders based on tribe and faith. And then, without a flicker of self-awareness, Babachir turns around and blames Atiku for the very same ethnoreligious politics that Babachir himself is actively practicing. He condemns Atiku for being a Fulani irredentist while rejecting Atiku solely because he is Fulani. He attacks Atiku as a religious hegemonist while opposing him entirely on the grounds of his Muslim identity. He demands that Northerners stop voting by religion while he himself cannot see past the religion of the candidate he hates.
This is not a political argument. This is a mirror. Babachir has written thousands of words attacking Atiku for the very sins that Babachir himself commits in every sentence. He has accused Atiku of dividing Nigerians along ethnic and religious lines while his own essay is a textbook example of ethnic and religious polarization. He has demanded that the North produce a leader based on competence rather than faith, yet he has not named a single competent candidate he supports because the only qualification he truly cares about is not being Fulani and not being Muslim. He has wrapped himself in the flag of conscience, but the flag is stained with the mud of his own prejudice. A man who cannot see his own reflection should not accuse others of being ugly.
Babachir appears to be competing for an award that no sane person would want. He is racing to become the most fallacious individual in Nigerian political discourse, and he is winning by a landslide. He claims the primaries were rigged and also that the North voted freely for Atiku. He condemns rigging while admitting he prefers Tinubu’s rigging machine. He attacks Atiku for ethnic and religious politics while practicing them openly. He preaches morality while carrying the baggage of the grass-cutting scandal on his back. He writes about conscience while his own political history is a graveyard of expired integrity. The man has lost not only his sense but his very wit. Hatred has hollowed him out. Hatred has made him believe that if he shouts loud enough, Nigerians will forget that the voice shouting belongs to a disgraced former SGF who profited from the suffering of displaced citizens.
Nigerians must not be fooled. Babachir Lawal is not a reformer. He is not a crusader against rigging. He is not a defender of merit over tribe and religion. He is a man consumed by a personal vendetta against Atiku Abubakar, and that vendetta has driven him to abandon logic, abandon consistency, and abandon the last shreds of his credibility. He has every right to leave the ADC. He has every right to oppose any candidate he wishes. But he does not have the right to insult the intelligence of the Nigerian people by presenting contradictions as arguments and prejudice as principle. The Allegory of the Grasscutter is not about Atiku. It is not about the North. It is about Babachir himself, a man who nibbled at the bait of corruption, got trapped in the cage of public disgrace, and now thrashes wildly, blaming everyone else for the cage he built with his own hands. Nigeria is watching. And Nigeria has seen through him.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]
Abuja Network News
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